The Supreme Court ruled Monday against the NCAA in landmark antitrust proceedings that specifically challenged the association’s ability to set national educational-related performance limits for athletes, but had generally cast doubts about its ability to limit performance at all .
The ruling ends the association’s nationwide restrictions on education-related benefits athletes can receive for college sports.
By upholding the judgments of lower courts, the judges upheld an injunction that could fundamentally change the NCAA’s amateur system.
Athletes playing Men’s or Women’s Division I basketball or Bowl Subdivision football may receive grants from their schools that are cash or cash equivalents based on academic or degree.
Other perks schools can also offer include scholarships to complete a bachelor’s or master’s degree at each school and paid internships after athletes complete their college sports eligibility.
Schools are not required to offer these types of services, and conferences can prohibit certain services if their member schools so wish. However, conferences cannot act together. If a conference decides to limit or prevent certain advantages, it risks giving other conferences a competitive advantage.
The verdict was unanimous.
Judge Neil M. Gorsuch’s statement noted that lower court rulings left the NCAA’s ability to “prohibit in-kind contributions unrelated to a student’s actual education”. However, he also wrote that to the extent that the NCAA wants to “propose some sort of court-ordered immunity from the terms of the (Antitrust Act) for its trade restrictions – we should overlook their restrictions because they happen to fall at the intersection”. of higher education, sport and money – we cannot agree. “
The ruling appeared to have at least an indirect impact on the NCAA’s attempts to resolve a number of other issues, including athletes’ ability to use their name, image, and likeness (NIL) to make money out of non-university institutions.
In a concurring statement, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote: “… there are serious questions as to whether the remaining NCAA compensation rules meet normal” antitrust analysis. Kavanaugh added that the NCAA must provide “legally valid” justification that “their remaining compensation rules” have sufficient value to promote competitive equilibrium and that the benefits outweigh the harm done to the athletes.
“In my view, however, the NCAA may lack such justification,” wrote Kavanaugh.
In an interview with USA TODAY Sports, NCAA President Mark Emmert, NCAA General Counsel Scott Bearby, and outside attorney Jeffrey Mishkin said little weight should be placed on what Kavanaugh wrote.
“The notable thing is that eight other judges disagreed and refused to sign,” Mishkin said. “So I don’t think you can make much of this match. It is his own point of view and he writes for himself. I think that is simply not at all central to what was decided today. “
The result represents a multi-level victory for the athlete plaintiffs’ attorneys. One of them, Steve Berman, has another case related to this before the same US District Judge who handled the Alston case, as well as a previous case in the Name of former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon who helped start the Alston case.
The new case not only requires the NCAA to issue association-wide rules that “limit the amount of compensation for name, image, and likeness” to athletes, but also calls for unspecified compensation based on the percentage of television rights and television rights The social media revenue that plaintiffs claim would have been received by athletes had it not been for the NCAA’s current limits on NIL compensation.
In addition, plaintiffs’ attorneys have been awarded more than $ 33 million in fees and costs following previous district-level judgments – a finding compounded by Monday’s unanimous ruling.
Including a $ 208 million settlement related to the damages portion of the original version of the Alston case, the legal challenge cost the NCAA and its eleven co-defendants at the conference well over $ 250 million in athlete settlements and legal fees . Some of the NCAA’s costs were covered by insurance, but a representative action brought against a group of insurers for alternative coverage in March – after more than five years – resulted in a loss in the Indiana Supreme Court.
“We hope that this victory in the fight for the rights of college athletes will continue a wave of justice that will elevate other aspects of athlete compensation. This is fair treatment college athletes deserve, ”Berman said in a statement Monday.
In a statement, the NCAA pointed to one of the few aspects of Gorsuch’s ruling that indicated his ability to control educational achievement – the part in which he upheld the lower court rulings that the association “could develop its own definition of achievement “. that relate to education and seek an amendment to the injunction of the court to reflect this definition. “
The NCAA said, “While today’s ruling maintains the lower court ruling, it also reaffirms the NCAA’s power to make appropriate rules and repeatedly states that the NCAA is free to articulate what are and what are real educational benefits not, in line with the NCAA’s mission to support student-athletes. ”
The case, originally filed in March 2014 on behalf of former West Virginia soccer player Shawne Alston, had nothing to do with NIL. But it focused on the level of antitrust scrutiny that the NCAA rules should face, particularly those related to the compensation of athletes.
The NCAA’s rules have severely restricted NIL activity by athletes, but it is about to relax those restrictions and allow them to participate in certain types of advertising contracts, monetize their social media followers, and get paid for autographing become. However, eight states have enforced the problem by passing laws that allow athletes to start making money from their NIL starting July 1 or whenever their schools request.
Due to the different state measures, the NCAA is aiming for a federal law that would create national NIL regulations. The association also wants the law to protect him from future claims related to compensation for athletes. Five bills were tabled in Congress that weigh the NCAA’s legal protection against the obligation of schools to do more for athletes than just allow them to do NIL deals.
Monday’s ruling came two and a half months after oral arguments for which incumbent US Attorney General for the Biden administration, Elizabeth Prelogar, partnered with lawyers for the athletes. The judges asked important questions about the NCAA’s compensation limits for athletes, but they also expressed concern that changing those limits could destroy college sport as it currently exists.
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Questions from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. illustrated the puzzle.
Roberts reached out to NCAA attorney Seth Waxman and found that NCAA rules allow colleges to pay for some form of insurance for elite athletes to cover if they suffer an injury that results in a significant depreciation of a professional sport conducts contract.
“That sounds a lot like paying for the game now,” said Roberts. “You know, you pay the insurance premium to get them to play in college and not the pros. Doesn’t that undermine your amateur status theory? “
But Roberts also urged the athletes’ attorney, Jeff Kessler. He noted that the decisions of the lower courts – and the additional educational benefits they approved – could result in the compensation limits for athletes being lifted.
“It’s like a game of Jenga,” said Roberts. “You have this nice solid block protecting the kind of product schools want to offer. And you pull out a log and then another and everything is fine and another and another. And suddenly the whole thing collapses. “
Kessler replied that this case was only about educational services.
Follow Steve Berkowitz on Twitter @ByBerkowitz
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